In November last year, Metallica announced their long-awaited return with Lux Æterna – a single that contained a guitar solo that attracted a fair amount of criticism from online commentators.
During a recent conversation with Total Guitar, Kirk Hammett hit back at the criticism, and shot down the notion that his lead effort on that track was “bad” because it was easy to play.
In his defence of his Lux Æterna solo, the Metallica maestro ridiculed the idea of playing with style over substance, and insisted all his lead efforts are deliberately composed with the song’s best sonic interests in mind.
Now, in a blunt rebuttal of Hammett’s TG points, Bradley Hall – whose video titled “Metallica Lux Æterna But The Solo Doesn’t Suck” was indirectly referenced and blasted by Hammett – has said the Greeny owner is making “excuses for lazy-ass playing”.
In a video posted to his YouTube channel, Hall responded to a handful of Hammett’s numerous quotes, including the latter’s observation that he finds sweep picking “weird” because it's “incredibly easy but sounds incredibly hard”.
However, Hall said listeners were within their right to question Hammett’s playing, and claimed his interpretation of their criticism was misdirected: Metallica fans weren’t concerned with the difficulty of the solo, but rather were interested in its content.
“People are not mocking him and his solos because they're not hard to play. People are mocking him because the solos sound lazy and completely throwaway,” Hall said.
“This is the most common deflection that people use when people are criticizing their playing. It's not about who can play the most complicated solo – he's missing the point and the point of the criticism.
“I think most people understood what I was trying to do with this video. But some missed the point, of course, including Kirk, I guess,” he continued. “It was not to try and one-up him. That's cringe.
“The idea of the video was just to try and show what could have been done if you just paid a bit more attention to what's going on in the backing – follow the riff and the rhythms and chords and all that stuff.”
In his chat with Total Guitar, Hammett also took aim at the tendency to load solos with complicated bouts of technical proficiency, saying he could “string together like six or seven three-octave arpeggios in 16th notes”, but that such an approach would sound “like an exercise”.
Again, Hall took issue with this point: “This is actually insulting to read coming from someone of Kirk's caliber. If you can't implement arpeggios into a solo and make it not sound like an exercise, then that's just a 'you' problem.”
Elsewhere in his video, Hall looked at 72 Seasons in general, and said the solo of Lux Æterna was indicative of a wider trend in Hammett’s playing.
He went on, “These are not memorable phrases. These just sound like somebody going through the motions and just playing something off the top of their head and not really being bothered to go back and refine it.
“Just because you went down the route of playing something more raw and improvised, it doesn’t mean that you have this right now to be all high and mighty. Fair enough if the level of improvisation was good and the phrasing was really nice. But it’s not. It just sounds like super-regurgitated, boring, lazy phrasing.”
Hammett has doubled down on his improvisational solo approach in recent interviews, so much so that he has said he is “freaking bored” of playing composed leads, including the Master of Puppets solo.
